Reading Between the Years
This is a space for the conversations that don’t fit neatly into headlines, talking points, or inspirational slogans about aging.
We’re two friends in our sixties, living this season in real time — the physical changes, the relational shifts, the unexpected griefs, and the freedoms no one prepared us for. We’re not here to offer advice or tidy conclusions. We’re here to talk about how it actually feels.
Each episode, we read between the years — the years behind us and the ones still unfolding — and name the emotions that often go unspoken. The doubts, the humor, the tenderness, the anger, the gratitude. All of it belongs.
If you’re tired of the rhetoric and ready for the real story, you’re in the right place.
Pull up a chair. This is Reading Between the Years.
Reading Between the Years
Chapter 10: Surface Tension
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(Intracellular or Extracellular?)
Good morning, everybody. It's Judy. Good morning. Dana's here too. We're back to chat at ya. Hopefully with ya, but chat at you at this point in time. Welcome to another little edition of Reading Between the Years.
SPEAKER_01Many, many years.
SPEAKER_00Many years, and many more to come. Absolutely. So you want to do your mug thing? Talk about how you came up with this?
SPEAKER_01Oh no, we were talking earlier about just showing you all our ugly mugs. I don't have my ugly mug. Actually, I have one of my favorite mugs today.
SPEAKER_00Nice.
SPEAKER_01Even bought me a Yeti. So maybe Yeti will sponsor us. No, he bought a Yeti for my birthday before Christmas. And uh and I get another one for Christmas because I love this one so much. But he's like our engine red, honey. There you go.
SPEAKER_00Now he's set with gifts for you forever. Oh, yeah. You're so trendy. Yeah. Mine is today. Mine is, believe you can't read it, society of EMS instructor coordinators. So this is the society of Judy and I, if you haven't figured out, have EMS backgrounds. That's actually how we met. She was my basic EMT uh teacher. Um, so this is the group of all the instructors. They get together, they have their own special level of licensure. And we actually went there as a vendor at one of their conferences. And of course, you go to a conference as a vendor. If you don't walk out with a mug, they're not doing their job, right?
SPEAKER_01So as a vendor, yeah, yeah. They had a whole table of those when we were there last month. Yep. And um, I I was like, I didn't get a mug. And yeah, they just kept dwindling down. I thought, are they free? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Get one of those. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00I've got another mugs at all. Well, and you'll see that I do too as we go through these mug introductions. So anyway, we'll counterbalance those mugs with our beautiful mugs. So welcome to another conversation. Yes. So once again, we we've, you know, before we start these, we talk about what we're going to talk about. And I heard something this week that I thought might be worthy of a conversation. I listen a lot to Dr. John Deloney, if you know him. I think he's amazing in the fact that people call with quandaries, problems, issues, whatever you want to call it. And he's able so much, so much to drill down. Because the problem is never what you think the problem is, right? You call with this basic thing. It's like, yeah, I'm feeling very sad. And he drills down, man. He doesn't let you get away without really figuring out what the problem is. And I think that is not only good radio, I mean, it's really good for the people that call because they leave with an awareness or an at least a better idea of what's really going on with themselves. And to be able to do that in a radio format, in a podcast format, to me is amazing. So I find him very valid. This is not an endorsement, just my opinion. So today they this last week, they had a caller that was 41 years old, and the headline on the on the podcast was, I'm 41 years old. How do I navigate the next phase of my life? So a woman called in and she was concerned about getting old. She was concerned about getting older. How do we deal with basically what we're talking about, right? Changes in your body, changes in your relationships, changes in everything that happens. You know, if you're not constantly moving, we're all like sharks, right? If we're not moving and changing, we're not living, as far as I'm concerned. And that's how you continue to learn and grow. And he drilled down with her to the point where she said, and probably didn't realize herself, that in her family structure, she had, I think, two other siblings. One was labeled the smart one, one was labeled the jock, and she was labeled the pretty one. And so she went through this. And this is uh, you know, it probably wasn't ever anything done in any formal way. It's just how it was understood, right? You're the pretty one, you're the jock. Yeah, I can see that happening in many dynamics.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So as she was getting older, I think she subconsciously was concerned that she was not going to be able to fulfill that role for the family. Not that it's a formal role, but it's it's a designation. It's a place, it's a place setting. It's uh it's somebody. Yeah. So she was concerned that what would happen to her identity, to her space, I believe. And I'm adding this in, of course. I imagine that's what she was worried about. What about her identity? Will she still fulfill that role in the family? How were her family members view her? Will she be letting them down if she's no longer the pretty one? You know, it was this one question turned into this huge mass of identity things around this woman that was really struggling. It's very interesting. Because I think did you have that in your family where you felt like you each had kind of a label?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, yeah. Um, we had my siblings ever see this. I don't know if they'll they'll actually agree with me. Um my oldest sister has always had more of like an olive complexion, which is not the same as the other four of us. And so we always teased her, oh, you're adopted, or or you know, the the other worst thing, oh mom cheated, and you're not dad's kid, or whatever. Oh even though there are plenty of other people in our family that she looks like. I mean, you can tell we're siblings, she just has more of an olive complexion. Yeah. Um and brown hair, which is I I think she looks a lot like my actually, she looks like my maternal grandmother, um, which I didn't know very well because she passed away when I was, I think, eight. But and then my second sister looks exactly like my dad's mom. I mean, spit an image practically. Everybody knows that, you know, Marsha looks like grandma and grandma is beautiful, the ivory skin, curly or wavy, you know, dark hair, uh kind of like yours. Um, and uh just classic black and white 30s picture of my grandmother. Um and Marsha was always, I don't know, I wouldn't call her the troublemaker, but my oldest sister was always the she was very much like my mom. She didn't like confrontation. My second oldest sister was kind of the opposite. Um, my third oldest sister, who in age-wise are we're the closest, um, she was the smart one, always the smart one. Always she has a master's degree now, so she actually proved that. And she was the smart one. She was looks-wise, she was a combination of all of us. Oh, I mean, we all considered ourselves cute, you know. You're pretty, whatever. Um, and then me, I was the blonde. Oh, wow. Blonde one, you know, I was the only one that was born with light hair, and I had light hair all the way through high school. Now it's suicide blonde, you know, done by my own hand. But um, yeah, I was just I was like like um the example that you were saying that she was the pretty one. It's like I was just the blonde one, and I was the youngest girl. I was the youngest. And then there's my brother, and he was the only boy. He was the youngest, he was the only boy, and and he was the favorite because he was the only boy. Oh, and we still tease him to this day, and he gets so angry that he was the only one that got paid to do chores around the farm. Because by the time that we all grew up, my brother was three years younger than me, that they could afford to actually pay him as a farmhand, you know, and they never hired anybody unless they were, you know, high school boys or high school guys, which it's it's it's kind of hilarious because if you're a father of four girls and one boy and you're hiring high school guys to work on your farm, what are you gonna do with all these girls? I mean, uh needless to say, we all worked on the farm, every one of us did, just as much as they did. But he hired people to put up hay or milk when he was doing other jobs, and I don't think any of us really did a whole lot of milking, but we were all put in those roles, and I wouldn't even call them roles, they're more like identities. Yeah, they're identities, and I think today, I mean, we're all in our 60s. I believe my oldest sister is 71. We still we still own them. Yeah, we still kind of own them, and um but one thing I did want to mention, so flip gears, if we back up just a tad, because my brain works while you're talking, and hopefully all of your brains work while we're talking, so you have a little reflection or self-reflection. Um, you were talking about how um John Deloney was getting under the the surface, and you know, that was just a surface issue. And I thought, you know, being in EMS, teaching EMS, I thought of cell surface tension. So just calling it surface tension. Yeah, it's not something that that um we like, but and is it tension? Yes. Is it on the surface? Yes. And we protect know that surface tension is on in a in a cell in your body is what covers the cell, and you have to get past that in order to move fluid around your cells, yeah. You know, um, osmosis, stuff like that. So it just reminded me of a multiple term of like, oh, it's like surface tension. You have to get in there and move things around in order to understand where this tension is coming from, where this idea is coming from. Because looking at it from a broad point of view, you know, you said that she had mentioned, yeah, I don't feel well, I feel uncomfortable, I don't know why. And he gets down deeper.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think she was cellular level. Yeah, literally. Um, I think that she was just she went into it just looking for tips, right? Tips and tricks, how to age, how to well just don't think about that so much. Well, just don't think about that. And I think that's another eternal truth from him, and I think from anybody that believes in the power of self-reflection is like the only way out is through. If you just keep padding, like our conversation on self-care, you keep giving yourself manny patties and they make you feel good for you know, my self-care is that I, you know, I do a face mask every Friday night after a week or something. That doesn't get you anywhere. You'll feel good and your skin will be beautiful for a while, but you get the only way out is through. You gotta go through it and it's surface, and it's yeah, you've just got to break through that surface tension because the more you just layer on the top, that's not gonna do anything for you. So I think she was, you could almost hear hesitation in her voice, hear me, you know. I'm the person that puts voices by an email, so I'm gonna put her thoughts in, you know, I'm gonna share because I have no idea. But it's like you could hear hesitation that she was like, oh man, I really gotta figure this out. You know, I think we all feel like why isn't there just a quick fix? Why can't you tell me that I need to start taking more vitamin E or whatever? That's not it. But you know, take a different vitamin or supplement and that'll make things better and my looks last longer. Or why don't you recommend plastic surgery so I can make my husband pay for it? I mean, that would be kind of the thoughts that I would imagine that you just want a quick fix, you know. We all think we want a quick fix, but these labels that we get, and like my um I had a friend of mine. I lived with a different family at times because we lived out in the we were the country mice, and my friend was the city mouse, and we were swimmers growing up, and so I would stay in town quite a bit to go to practices because we were doing two a day, three a day sometimes in the summer. Okay, and uh her dad would call me chunky, you know, little things like this too. It's like call me chunky. So I carried that with me my whole life. I'm I'm and I wasn't, but it was just like what an interesting thing. The power of words, man. Especially, I mean, we have to also recognize that if communication is the message and the receipt of the message, there probably is some dynamic for us as kids when we hear those things that we glom onto them, that we attach to them. So at some point in time, I don't know why, but I I kind of internalize that. Um, and it's just you know, words have meanings. We gotta be we gotta be careful with that stuff. Yeah, I just thought, yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's funny because I was we saw our grandsons at their soccer game on Saturday, and uh, I was telling their dad their well, yeah, their nicknames or the nicknames I have for them. Yeah, it just made me think of that. And I thought, oh, because I call Liam swing set and I call Levi Jump Rope. Uh maybe they're not so bad. Tell me they're not so bad at all. That doesn't have anything to do with those are just but yeah, they don't have anything to do with maybe you, like at the age of 13, thinking you're chunky.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. But oh man. But I think about that too with with one of my granddaughters, is 10, and I want her to be a well-rounded human, have self-identity, and be strong in every aspect of who she is as a human. So I I consciously and I feel stupid about doing it, but I I vividly remember being this age, and I vividly remember the things that happened in my life that affected me to this day, right? So when you were 10? Yeah, oh, absolutely. Wow, because we moved overseas when I was eight or nine. So I remember that vividly. So like one day it'll be, wow, you look so pretty today. And then the next day I'll make sure I say something about how strong, you know, she is or how smart, you know, to make sure that there's a balance. Right. Because I think it's it's all it reminds me of my father too. Here, let me talk in circles. His questions were always the same to each one of us kids, depending on who he was talking to, when he would check in with us. With with my brother, with me, with my middle brother, it was always, do you have any friends? How are you how are you and your friends doing? With me, it was how much do you weigh? How much are you weighing these days? Your dad said that? Yeah. And so it was always what he picked up on as a way to connect with each of them. I can't remember what my oldest brother's was. It probably had something to do with school or smart or something like that, because he was the the smart one. Not that my other brother isn't smart, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I know. But I just remember it was always with me, it was always my weight, and with my other brother, it was always. Does he have any friends? What are you doing with your friends? Tell me about your friends.
SPEAKER_01It was like stuck like for years, the same thing.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, that was always the that was always the question growing up because he could probably tell what we were focusing on and what we were concerned about, and so he was focusing in on that. But it's it's just amazing how you get in these ruts and these patterns of labels and roles and interactions that's really interesting. They continue to shape shape you as you go through.
SPEAKER_01And you even remember all three of those things that your dad asked you and your siblings.
SPEAKER_00Because it was it was constant. You know, but if you you know, our fathers who did their duty, right? They worked and they provided for the family, and the mothers raised the kids, the amount of time that they actually spent with us was pretty minimal. So perhaps they got those things from our mothers, you know, what we're working on from our mothers, so that when they had the moment to connect with us, they went right to it, right? They went right to it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that's what it, that's what it seems like is intentional connection, even though, like for me, when you said your what your dad said to you, how much are you weighing? I thought, wait, what he said that to you? Like, hey, hey Data, how much do you weigh now? Yeah, but that's what that's kind of like weighing these days. Oh, yeah, I used to do it all. How I pictured the the the tone, I guess. Yeah, I maybe and and maybe that wasn't it at all. Yeah um someone said something to me a couple weekends ago about we were talking about um at a conference I was at about intentional um questions, like open inquiries versus closed inquir inquiries, or um, you know, your yeah, I guess it's you could just call it intention. Um, and they were talking about I mean I may even said this last week, about um just saying, hey, how you doing? You know, and then you're always everybody always says, Oh, I'm fine. But someone said, ask people what keeps you busy these days. That's like, oh man, I could tell you a whole, you know, you got a half an hour because everybody's just too busy. Yeah, but it's a pretty open-ended question instead of just saying, How you doing? Fine, how are you? Fine. Um so yeah, that's that's pretty interesting because now it makes me reflect back on what should I say to my kids to start a conversation, or even just text them and say, instead of how's your day going? Because that seems to be the norm. How's your day, honey? You know, for your kids or even your spouse or or whoever.
SPEAKER_00Because there's the infamous, infinite and infamous fine. Fine.
SPEAKER_01It was fine.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm okay. Yeah, I used to do that with my kids. I I tried to either take them to school or pick them up from school when I was at Butterworth in the ER. I tried to make sure I was doing both. I really liked, especially with boys picking them up because they couldn't get away with the fine. They were still they were still in the talkative mood. Captive. Once they started riding the bus, forget about it. I think buses lull kids to sleep. Some I think it energizes and they go nuts, but my kids it would lull to sleep because by the time they got home, it would they wouldn't even want to talk. But yeah, catching them in that prime time where it was right after school where they were still full of activity in their brains, you could get more than the fine, but yeah, like fine. Yeah, I agree. And we were never good at the dinner at the table every night, everybody eats at six o'clock. You know, we all sit down and tell us about your day. You know, I never did that, but we did that when we were younger when I was growing up.
SPEAKER_01We did that a lot, um, especially on weekends or Sunday after church, Sunday night. Every once in a while, grandparents would come over, you'd have supper. Because according to my dad, the only day that dinner and supper were employed as terminology was on Sunday because Monday through Saturday it was breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then on Sunday it was breakfast, dinner, and supper. Don't know why. Maybe it's a farming thing. I don't know. But supper meant dinner on Sunday. Oh, interesting. Yeah, but um, yeah, when we were kids, we had we were blessed enough to have that. And we joined my dad for a family dinner um in the end of March. Um, and we all made sure that we sat in our spots at the table because we all sat in the same spot. Interesting. You know, I sat to my dad's left, and then man, I know my sister was across, and so we had an odd number of kids, obviously. My mom and dad were always at the ends. My dad was by the window, my mom was at the end, of course, closer to the kitchen. Yeah. You know, so she could go run back and forth constantly. Um yeah, so we um we were discussing who sat where and that it because it's it's one of those things that impacts you, and which made me which made it worse with me because I sat next to my dad. And and so that made it made it worse that I was the favorite. Yeah, you know, or yeah. I don't know if anybody other families do that, but as we got older, we all got into sports. Most of us got into sports. My mom and dad started um driving bus before and um for morning and afternoon school, besides running our farm. Wow. And um, so we didn't see my folks. My dad would come home from a driving bus at you know 4:30, 5 o'clock, go straight out to the barn, finish milking, or finish doing anything he had to do for the next morning that he'd get up at 4 a.m. for. And we didn't have family dinner dinners after that. I remember also waking up um after my three oldest sisters were kind of out of the house, they went to college. I was in high school, my brother, I was a senior, or even even from junior high on, I think. And my brother was a freshman. We'd have to wake ourselves up and get us our ourselves off to school. And I hated that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I I hated that. I hated waking up not having a parent in the house because it made me feel not really abandoned, just like, oh, could I get away with not going to school today? Oh, that's what it is. Well, it was. I, you know, speaking of surface tension, it probably was feeling a little bit of abandonment. But why are you not here, mom? Yeah, or dad. And we were all used to dad not being home when we woke up. We used to, my dad teased us too. He still teases us to this day that he would come in from milking um at 7 a.m., wake us up in the summer, you know, on purpose and say, Come on, get up. It's the middle of the day. You got to do something. 7 a.m. It's the middle of the day. No, it's not dad. Let us go back to sleep. We gotta hay today, we gotta do this today. Burn in daylight. That was Always like you. Exactly. I mean, you literally have to make hay while the sun shines. Yeah. There's no doubt about it. Like growing up. And a lot of people don't even know what that means anymore.
SPEAKER_02No.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it everybody's dynamic is different. It's it's very different. And to have to delve deep into that, like this lady that you were talking about, that's tough.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's tough to for somebody to tell you you're gonna have to work on this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You're gonna have to go through it. Yeah, it's I mean, and just the thought of so if we look at all these families that are cutting off each other because of something that happened in the childhood, something that was probably said just for convenience, like you said, smart one, pretty one, whatever, just for convenience to be able to tell maybe in a conversation somebody else how the roles of the not the roles. Why do I keep saying roles? How how that parent sees those kids, right? How they're kind of designated seems so benign. It seems so whatever. It's just a comment. I mean, would do should we be taking into consideration where the child is, you know, when they hear that or when they receive that? I think that I like I like the trends of parenting now where they talk about, you know, get down on the kid's level, calm everything down. If you're going to have a conversation, have a conversation. So perhaps they're getting rid of the extraneous noise and the extraneous feelings, and they're able to focus. And like you said, intention, right? Intention in your communication. So maybe there aren't misunderstandings, or it isn't received in a way in which it wasn't intended. Um, so that maybe we can bridge some of these gaps. But it is amazing what kids internalize. I thought of another one while we were sitting here talking. We were painting our house in England, the walls in the living room, and I was told that I wasn't big enough to paint. You're not big enough to paint. And then that was another one we were on a trip, and I wasn't big enough to row the canoe. So it was that kind of stuff. And my my my my previous husband would say that to me. You're not big enough to do that. You know, it was always the joke because he knew that dig, man. That would dig. And it's so nice because I'm noticing in these last bunch of months that that doesn't have a bearing on me now, right? I don't know what it is that flips in our switches as we grow older, where it's kind of like that was just a comment. You know what I mean? Why did I internalize that so heavily? And other and I am far from being nine years old, you know. How have I not proven to myself to the point where I believe that I'm big enough to paint? Damn it. Yeah, exactly. I think you've painted a lot. I think I've painted, but it's amazing how you know she's 41 years old, she hasn't realized the power of that, and she should be grateful that she gets there because some people never get there, some people never have the ability to break through these things, yeah, yeah, and you know, never have had the opportunity to see themselves beyond what they were labeled as children, and to be able to realize that work has to happen on her part as opposed to still looking for that external fix, yeah. Anything it's like you fix this. The person that said it, yeah, you fix this.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, yeah, we could talk about this next week too. Yeah, um, we are running out of time, so um we'll come back at you with our ugly mugs next week.
SPEAKER_00Hopefully, but um thank you, Dana. It was great seeing you. She's well, and comment below if you have anything you think would be interesting to talk about.
SPEAKER_01Yes, please give us ideas and give us a follow. Please subscribe to our channel. We're trying, we're just two ladies trying to make it work. Have a great day. Have a great one. Bye-bye.